What a wonderful thing a heart is, Jack thought, while lying on his sleeping lover's chest, listening to the slow, steady heartbeat.

The heart with his chambers and valves, it's intricate maze of arteries and veins. Flooding the body with blood and oxygen, enabling the body to stretch its muscles, to touch, to feel.

The heart, that for so many centuries to come would be the effigy of love and affection.

Every time Jack came back to life his heart was the very first thing he felt. It was also the most painful part of his awakening.

Not his lungs expanding or his neurons sending synapses through his brain, but his heart restarting, finding the right pace, pushing against his ribs, his lungs, reclaiming it's rightful place.

Of course, where Jack came from, the heart had been reduced to just another organ. A very valuable one, but it had lost all romantic attraction. No more heart shaped chocolate boxes for valentines.

Science had long since reduced feelings to mere chemicals, progesterone, oestrogen, serotonin, pheromones.

But Jack understood why more primitive cultures preferred the heart to hard science. The heart is such a magnificent instrument with which you measure so many emotions.

Like, every time his lover looked at him, his heart would flutter. Every time he felt his lover's hands stroke him, his heart would skip a beat.

Every time he collapsed in ecstasy on top of his lover's body he would feel his heart explode, and every time he thought of losing him he felt his heart break.

It wouldn't be easy, losing yet another person he so desperately fell in love with. No scientific proof of chemical imbalance would be able to mend the pain heartbreak will, undoubtedly, bring along.

That's why with every chance he had, he'd spend memorizing the rhythm of his lover's heartbeat, because he knew, that one day that heart would stop beating.

That the deafening silence that followed would make his own heart numb. He knew that at night, when the loneliness and the silence took hold of him again, only that rhythm would keep his own heart from shattering

He looked up at the sleeping man next to him, put his ear back on his chest and memorized the beating yet again.